Facebook let a family sell their 16-year-old girl as a child bride, and only noticed 2 weeks later

Women are screened for malnutrition at a joint UNICEF-WFP Rapid Response Mission (RRM), which delivers critical supplies and services to those displaced by conflict, in Nyanapol, northern Jonglei, March 3, 2015.
REUTERS/Siegfried Modola

A South Sudanese family auctioned off their 16-year-old daughter to marry the highest bidder.

Facebook told Business Insider that it removed the post and permanently disabled the account.

But that took place six days after the girl had been given away.

South Sudan's legal marriage age is 18, but more than half of the country's girls are married before then.

A family in South Sudan used Facebook to auction off their 16-year-old daughter as a child bride and managed to complete the transaction before anybody could stop it.

The family in Eastern Lakes, a central region of South Sudan, put up a post selling off the girl on October 25, Reuters reported. She was married off on November 3, according to Plan International, a British girls' rights charity.

Facebook told Business Insider that it found the post on November 9 — more than two weeks after it was first posted — and permanently removed it.

George Otim, the South Sudan country director at Plan International, said in a statement: "This barbaric use of technology is reminiscent of latter-day slave markets. That a girl could be sold for marriage on the world's biggest social networking site in this day and age is beyond belief."

A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement: "Any form of human trafficking — whether posts, pages, ads or groups is not allowed on Facebook. We removed the post and permanently disabled the account belonging to the person who posted this to Facebook."

"We're always improving the methods we use to identify content that breaks our policies, including doubling our safety and security team to more than 30,000 and investing in technology," they added.

Facebook's Community Standards forbid users to post content or engage in human trafficking, which includes "recruiting, transporting, transferring, detaining, providing, harboring, or receiving a minor, or an adult against their will."